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by the New York City Gay Men's Chorus
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CD Review by Perry Brass
Last week I got an advance copy from the New York City Gay Men's Chorus
of their new CD Gay Century Songbook, which features three works
commissioned for the chorus by the Dick Cable Fund, a musical trust set
up to commission new works with gay themes to commemorate the life of
Dick Cable, a long-time NYCGMC member who died of AIDS about twelve
years ago.
I have had, so far, a kind of interesting association with gay choruses, in that several pieces that I have written the words for have become part of their repertory. Lately, "Matthew's Lullaby," a piece I wrote with Craig Carnahan, the former director of the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus in Minneapolis, after the murder of Matthew Shepard, has been performed by that chorus and, I believe, two other choruses. The choral version of "Walt Whitman in 1989," the last song in "All the Way Through Evening," the five-song cycle Chris DeBlasio set to my poems, is done several times a year someplace. And, simply enough, I had a wonderful relationship with Gary Miller, the former director of the NYCGMC. I received two commissions through the Dick Cable Fund for the chorus, and really got to love working with Gary. We had an amazing personal rapport with one another-it seemed to happen instantly, and I was delighted by that. I think part of it was the feeling that we were both quite shy men who had to deal with the public, but who also had intense personal relationships; that feeling seemed to be innate with us and drew us together. We could talk easily. Gay choruses are a wonderful, important part of what we call "gay culture." They were some our first public happenings; they came after gay church groups were started and in some cases they came out of church choirs. One thing I have learned is that singing has always been associated with groups of gay men. It has always been a way for men to open themselves up, and Walt Whitman, the great sage of all of us, wrote passionately about being moved by opera, by the popular music of his day, and by his sense of inner music. He wrote "I Hear America Singing," one of his most quoted (and musically set) poems about the musicality of this country. Another of his poems, "In Louisiana, I Saw a Live Oak Growing," about seeing a lone tree in Louisiana that was yearning for other trees like it, has been set several times by contemporary composers and sung by gay choruses. But going even further back, I learned that in the Middle Ages singing was a way for men who might now be gay-identified to group together. The wandering French troubadours had reputations for being notoriously "lovers of men." Richard the Lionhearted's lover Blondel was a troubadour, who followed him in the Crusades to the Holy Land where the king died, away from his wife and England.
New York City's Gay Men's Chorus
In Italy, the troubadours were called "joia," or "joyful," and they roamed about "little Italy," as Cole Porter called it, wearing colorful, often beribboned drag and long, curled hair, entertaining at weddings, court events, and other village gatherings. (An old Italian slang expression for gay men is "persone de joia," which stems directly from this.) The joia were known for their dancing as well as singing, and they can be seen in fifteenth century paintings, strumming away or dancing in circles, their long tresses flowing behind them. Gay Century Songbook is the NYCGMC's attempt to integrate the gay past with the chorus's own life and future. The piece, which comprises sixteen cuts on the CD, has words and libretto by Michael Korie with music by Larry Grossman. It was commissioned for the chorus's twentieth anniversary, and some if it deals with the group's own history with Carnegie Hall. It was the first openly gay group to use the hall, and now does at least one concert a year there. Going to hear this big chorus of over a hundred men at Carnegie Hall is by itself a moving experience. Here we are at the magnificent hall of Arturo Toscanini and Vladimir Horowitz and Pete Seeger and Judy Garland and just about everyone, where Tchaikovsky conducted his own work at the turn of the nineteenth century, on his tour of America . . . Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, always looking for his "partner," the black swan from "Swan Lake," the prince to awaken him from his own long, sad sleep. Tortured (possibly murdered) for his homosexuality-if only Pyotr Ilich could be there to hear the New York City Gay Men's Chorus! Imagine his feelings . . . triumphant, humbled, tickled a Russian champagne pink, maybe even embarrassed (they can do some clinkers now and then, although the New York City Gay Men's Chorus has, happily, stayed away from the endless Jerry Herman medleys that keep some gay choruses afloat). Anyway, you don't have to stretch yourself to New Jersey to understand how I feel: here we are in a way up there, on that great stage, singing for ourselves and, really, to ourselves. That has been the magic of this chorus, and actually of all gay choruses. There are now dozens of them all over the country, but the first one was in New York and it was started by Gary Miller, who recently retired from it. Barry Oliver is now artistic director, and I can't say that we've become buddies; but people go off in different directions and the NYCGMC is now trying to find a direction to keep itself going in the Millennium, when being gay is either just another "consumer option" (if you believe PlanetOUT or GFN), or something you can be cheerily murdered for in Wyoming, Texas, or points thereabout. In Gay Century Songbook, though, the chorus, which is very much a part of this work (individual chorus members get up and introduce themselves, as in Michael Bennet's A Chorus Line, and then sing their stories) has tried to bring our usually buried past as a rich part of the gay experience to life. In most instances, it does not really happen. Michael Korie has done his homework (and probably read George Chauncey's wonderful book, Gay New York) but in trying to go after the lost past, Korie ends up often merely swacking you with cleverness. In one of the better songs, about the reticent Boston Marriages of the turn of the century, where a pair of usually, upper class women pretended just to be "good friends," he says, "We have a 'Boston Marriage' in Grammercy Park./ The accepted nomenclature/ for a twosome of our nature./ When a lady loves a lady/ and it's not a passing lark/ it's a dear little, mere little/ 'Boston Marriage' in Grammercy Park." The song goes on to say that, because there were so many Boston Marriages around it, "that's why they gate Grammercy Park." Yeah, sure. In "Something So Gay in A Barbershop Quartet," the chorus tries to open the inner joke among them that "straight men don't 'get' Lida Rose." (Well, maybe I don't get it either.) And in "That Way" they detail how the original Gay Nineties lady might know if her intended was "that way." "Does he wear an ascot?/ Is he fond of silk moire?/ Is a silver fox his mascot?/ He's 'That way.'" (Other tip-offs are a fondness for the poetry of Swinburne, ballet, musclemen and lifeguards: things ain't changed that much, right?) These songs are cute, pleased with themselves, and sound, I'm afraid, like they tinkled right out of Jerry Herman's much neglected "Mack and Mabel," except, unfortunately they were better there. So you have to wade through this to get to the good stuff, which does happen. This happens when you realize the past does have a real emotional tug on us. That we can identify with men who may be dead for almost a century, but whose struggle to survive in hard situations we can see. A whole virtual song cycle within the piece begins in Julius's, the hoary old bar in Greenwich Village that started out as a 1920s "sporting bar" (code: an all-male saloon) and speakeasy and today is openly gay. It goes into "Kieran McHugh Remains Abroad," about the "boldest queer in the army" who was lucky enough to die in World War I, rather than have to come home to constant humiliation and hiding, and then suddenly rounds off into "I Joined the Army," a true story from one of the Chorus members who sings "I joined the Army to make me straight/ and never touched another human being/ I thought the Army would let me hide." This is just heartbreakingly lovely, especially when the singer reveals that after becoming a major in the service, he became "a major gay rights advocate," and now his own spirit will merge with the flaming red of the poppy on Kieran McHugh's almost anonymous grave. The wonderful baritone Chris Pedro Trakis is the soloist in "Kieran McHugh Remains Abroad," and he luxuriates in this piece. Suddenly, the whole thing pops right out. Chris has sung pieces of mine in the past. He has a honeyed, rich voice and you want to lick him right off the stage. (But then, of course, that is only my prejudice.) In another really moving section, the chorus sings - from "The Salem United Methodist Church in Harlem, 1934" about "Lavender," the maligned color that can change shades, blend in, and yet remain distinctive. "Thank God He made lavender, I got bored with blue." It is a touching, simple, and lovely piece. Unfortunately, after this, there is a whole section about antique queens ("Antiques Row, Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, 1948"), who certainly deserve a history of their own. But the cuteness of this piece wears; Korie tries to get too many clever syllables into one line - and Noel Coward did that better. In the end, what remains is simply the Chorus singing at Carnegie Hall. "The Old Hall" brings to mind the feeling, the question, where do we all go? All those men who have sung together, all those notes, where do they go? "Men and music are ephemeral, ripples in a restless tide./ Funny though, the way a song you sang/ brings back the men you sang beside." After Gay Century Songbook, the CD presents, kind of as a throw-in, two other commissions from the Dick Cable Fund. The first is "In This Heart of Mine," with words by Robert Espindola and music by Robert Seeley, who composed the score to another long, very successful gay chorus piece, commissioned by the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, "Naked Man."
"Angel Voices" was the first piece commissioned by the Dick Cable Fund, and it had an amazing gestation story of its own, which I am not too modest to tell you about. It is a fairly long piece, close to fifteen minutes, and it started out as a poem that I had written as a present for the countertenor Drew Minter. In case you don't know, a countenor is a male voice that sounds close to a female alto. It is not a falsetto, but a high, lovely, sustained male sound. Besides being one of the great (openly gay) artists of this period, Drew has a voice that you expect violets to come rushing out of. I had never been so completely floored by a countertenor before I heard him, for the first time, at a Bach "B Minor Mass" in Manhattan. I was enraptured. It was like Walt Whitman himself was sitting next to me, tickling me with his beard in my ear. The late Chris DeBlasio, who had set "All the Way Through Evening" was a friend of Drew's as well as mine, and he told me that he thought the words to "Angel Voices," with their baroque floweriness and yet starkness, sounded like they should be coming directly from Drew's lovely throat. Chris was given the commission to set the poem for the chorus, but died four months after getting it, at the tragic age of thirty-four, having been paid half the commission before he died. I read a poem I had written especially for Chris at his memorial service in August of 1993, and, at the reception afterwards, decided on my own that I wanted this commission to take place. I spoke with Gary Miller, whom I had not met, and John Martinon, the generous donor who commissioned the piece, and decided, myself, right then (on the spot) that this would be "one of the great pieces of art in this century." I was sure it would be up there with Stravinsky, etc., and enter the halls of great art. Okay, pretty damn puffy of me, right? I was positive that this would be so, mostly because both Drew and Chris had loved the poem so much, and I felt that I had placed so much of myself in it that there was no way it could be otherwise. There is nothing, in short, like having young gifted artists around you to make you start preening your own feathers. (However, little did I know then about the intestinal-twisting process of making words into music . . . ) It was easier, strangely enough, to convince John Martinon than Gary of this. John generously produced the money for the extension of the commission. He wanted very much to have something tangible to keep his lover, Dick Cable's name alive. For years I thought I couldn't sell sterno to Eskimos on a cold night, but I did and we got Ricky Ian Gordon, a rising young star among composers to set it. Ricky, Drew, and I had lunch together on the West Side to swap ideas and egos. I learned that when composers and singers get together, try to get out of the way as quickly as possible; then I sat back and kind of hoped for the best. The piece was scheduled to be premiered as part of the Chorus's "Celebration 25" concert at Carnegie Hall, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall. The Gay Games were in town, the Seattle Gay Men's Chorus would also appear on the stage. It was going to be a mega-event.
In the long tradition of librettists, whom I describe as being like "escorts at a drag ball," necessary but they don't get to wear all the nice clothes (or a real place in the program), I told Ricky: "Well, it's quite a piece." And it was, actually. It did hold together. The sheer loveliness of it does come through. Ricky harnessed a huge energy to this piece and was as moved by the words as Drew and Chris had been. (Although, I was told later on by some chorus members, that it was hard as hell to sing, and they dubbed it "The Angel Voices from Hell.") Finally, Drew got the music, and then, only a short while before the premiere, decided that he had another "engagement" in Europe. Later, he told me that there was no way he could sing what Ricky had written for him and not be tarred-and-feathered out of Carnegie Hall: it was written more for a female soprano than a counter tenor, and later countertenors who tackled it told me likewise. Luckily, the chorus was able to get Larry Lipnik, a wonderful countertenor who's also a fine early music musician, to do it and Larry was able to convince Ricky to lower the register of the solo. Then, on the big night, Ricky and I, our respective lovers, and John Martinon and several of his friends, sat together in a center box at Carnegie Hall for the premiere. I was, as the Jews say, "kvelling." Here I was, doing something that few people get to do in their lifetimes: hear your work performed at Carnegie Hall. Of course, as merely the poet who provided the backbone and structure of the work, I was pretty much lost in the process. American classical music, traditionally, obliterates the importance of words. Part of this comes from the standard of singers who can only speak English learning the words to operas, cantatas, etc. totally by rote: so, they can be singing the Yellow Pages and it wouldn't make a difference. We also have a cultural attitude that words are just words-words, as we say, are "cheap"-and whether it's Shakespearean English or "Bee Boppalooba," it's all the same. For the this reason "art songs" have almost no place in American culture and opera is considered kind of a "weirdness." Opera, which is truly all about words, all about stories, all about plot, really dies here. We can do Rock Operas, Pop Operas, Hip Hop Operas, but to produce a work where the singer gets out and opens his (or her mouth) and something totally passionate, personal, meaningful, and touching comes out . . . because the words are all about that . . . it just don't seem to happen here. Americans have produced something like two real operas. ("Porgy and Bess" and "The Ballad of Baby Doe," would be my nominations. Recently there have been a few new contenders, but we can quibble about that later.) Strangely enough, in pop songs, the words are still everything. Part of that is that kids have good memories and remember the lyrics to any top forty songs. And pop songs now take on the personality that opera used to. (Who can forget Dionne Warwick singing "Walk On By"? Even Madame Butterfly couldn't have done misery better.) So, in the world of pop, the words still mean something, and in classical music they are basically dummies to hang the clothes on. It's a sad story, but it has contributed to "serious" music not being taken seriously here at all. The recorded version of "Angel Voices" uses the NYCGMC's smaller Chamber Choir rather than the whole chorus. It actually comes off better; the words are easier to hear. The piano solo is wonderful, better than it was that first time around at Carnegie Hall, and the countertenor, who actually sounds more like a male soprano (called a "sopranist," his voice is that high), is excellent. I mean really good. He (Eric Brenner is listed on the back tray of the CD as the soloist; with nothing to tell us who he is, I am afraid), has brought the piece (along-I'm sure-with Barry Oliver's direction) into that thrilling air when something does become a part of sheer art. Of repertory. Unfortunately, the words to "Angel Voices" are not printed in the short, very inadequate CD notes. (Neither are artists' bios, or any real history of the pieces.) It's lamentable that this is so, and also that Ricky Gordon, a more "known quantity" among contemporary composers than anyone else on the CD, is not mentioned on the front of the CD. That might have given Gay Century Songbook a better toehold sales wise. But what is good is that these "Angel Voices" will be heard again, and I'm thankful for that, as I'm sure Chris DeBlasio would be as well. Afterall, the CD is about the gay past that we want to keep alive. So I hope you will give the Gay Century Songbook a listen. The old twentieth century, which started out, I think, so bitterly and difficult for gay men and lesbians, will be only the prologue for something wonderful to come. But that prologue needs to be understood. Remember, we all came from it. Coda: Since they weren't printed in the CD booklet, here are the words to "The Angel Voices of Men." When they were written in 1990, we were in the thick of the AIDS crisis. Although AIDS is certainly still with us today - and it plays a part in this piece -what I really wanted to deal with was the eternality of our own gay experience and of art itself. The Angel Voices of Men The angel voices of men cry out in the morning, bright with all the sweet elixirs of energy: the bravery of the day waves transparent, giving us wings and feet shod in golden sandals. Our eyes look down upon all human enterprise and surmise the challenge is ours: we are boys at play, fine fellows; and trouble is meek in our paths. We cannot weep nor waste tears on youth; what a delicious gift it is but quickly spoiled and brought to grief by ambition. How light, alive, and stirring we are-heaven upward in angel flight, in rare winds through arches of fantasy and the delights of woods and amber streams, of dreams that come alive with every voyage. The angel voices of men call to us, Alive! Alive! Alive! Until the evening presses its sad face: a Mother as she calls and takes back the evening sun, enfolding her young: how few are here when the darkness comes- ( ... Oh, angel voices of men, siren voices ... ) the light, silvered voices that seem so dim now, and fall behind the purple rolling breeze, through trees that gossip to one another, while the men alone fear and listen and hold each other, against the cold, against the darkness, waiting for the glowing dawn to shine once more, and bring his rippling kiss, this gift of angel voices that cry again aloud: Alive ... alive. December 27, 1990 for Drew Minter. Ridgefield, CT © Perry Brass For more information about the New York City Gay Men's Chorus's Gay Century Songbook CD, you can visit their website at www.nycgmc.org. The CD retails at $17.00. Perry Brass's latest novel, Angel Lust, is about time travel, hairy bear men with interesting pasts, and nights as black and stormy as a witch's brew. (It is also, he has been told, very hot.) You can learn more about him and his work at www.perrybrass.com. |
Perry Brass 
© 1997-2000 BEI